


Qui Donne Naissance aux Irresponsables?

by dotpng



Category: Halt and Catch Fire
Genre: Coming Out, Coming of Age, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-24
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-24 09:19:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8366860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dotpng/pseuds/dotpng
Summary: Haley is five and her eyes are still full of stars; you know she’s still thinking of princess Leia and spaceships and lightsabers but you see your dad standing on the sidewalk with this tall stranger towering over him and you can feel that something is changing.





	1. Chapter 1

You’re six when Joe MacMillan shows up unannounced at the movie theater and sets in motion events that whisk your already distant father away for the better part of two years. Even then, as you wait in the car for him, your mother chews her lip and frowns. Haley is five and her eyes are still full of stars; you know she’s still thinking of princess Leia and spaceships and lightsabers but you see your dad standing on the sidewalk with this tall stranger towering over him and you can feel that something is changing.

In the following months he all but disappears, always at work except for the times he and mom argue in whispers after your bedtime when they think you can’t hear them, about money and about trust and about priorities. He misses parent-teacher meetings and family dinners and school plays.

You tell your mother you miss him. “I know, honey, “ she says, kissing the top of your head. “Me too.”

 

A month before you turn seven, Dad’s supposed to pick you up from school but he never shows. All your friends leave, one by one, until you and Haley are alone in the principal’s office and she’s on the phone with your mom. “This is simply unacceptable… Mrs Clark, I understand, but… No, he’s not here… It’s twenty past, I can't just…” With every word you sink deeper into your chair. Haley tugs on your sleeve. “Joanie, are we in trouble?”

“No,” you say, “Daddy is.”

At least that's what you think, at first. When he arrives your mother hisses at him about remembering to take care of his daughters for _once_ in his life, and you hold Haley’s hand tight and wait for them to stop fighting, but then you all get in the car and suddenly you're on your way to Dad’s work, so Mom can fix Cameron’s mess, he says, so you guess he’s not the only one in trouble.

Cameron isn’t like any girl you've ever met. She cuts her own hair and she wears whatever she wants. Your father made her sound awful and stupid, but like she says in a conspiratorial whisper, he's kind of a square. She hangs out with you and Haley while Mom works in the basement, shows you all the stuff she grabbed from the office and makes you giggle with stories about sneaking around the office at night. “You're not trash,” you say, and the laughter dies on Cameron’s face.

“Yeah, you're fun.” adds Haley. There’s a pause. You want so badly to take it back but it’s too late; the moment is over.

 

You’re eight when Cardiff Electric is sold and your dad gets his share. You and Haley wait in the living room for hours, in your nice dresses, for your mother to come home so you can all go celebrate the sale together, as a family. You know enough at this point that you aren’t surprised when it turns out she’s working late again; your dad, on the other hand, knows enough to distract you both with sundaes. You get vanilla with fudge and sprinkles; it’s not worth it, but it is good.

Your friend, Alex, says the only good thing about her parents getting a divorce is they feel so guilty they always buy her toys and candy. You guess this is kind of like that. Your mom and dad are still married, and they love each other very much, they say, but like Alex it seems you only get one parent at a time.

“Daddy, are we rich now?” you ask, swirling your sundae into chocolate sludge. You’re looking for something that’ll make up for the missed bedtimes, the empty seat at the dinner table. He hesitates. “I’m not quite sure how to answer that, sweetheart,” he says.

“Well, are we millionaires?” A million is something you can understand. It is not an article in Businessweek or a nebulous ranking in personal computer sales. If you’re millionaires, it’s a tangible thing to point to, to you, to your sister, to the kids who whispered behind your backs when your dad never showed up to pick you up from school.

“Mm, with some smart investments in the next four or five years…” he starts. You are not millionaires. You’re just the kids with the father who dug a hole in the front yard. But at least, you think, he’s here now.

That’s when his nose starts to bleed. He waves off your concern, says it's nothing, but your dad’s never been the best judge of things.

 

When you’re nine you move to California and Cameron moves in with you, and her mess of mugs and clothes and CDs takes up half your room but you don't mind at all. She’s the coolest person you’ve ever known and now she lives with you; and at night when you can't sleep you whisper back and forth in the dark until you fall asleep. She gets the top bunk and for the first few week she slams her head against the ceiling every other morning; the rest of the time she just sleeps through her alarm and you wake up to an arm and a leg hanging off the bunk, having to shake her awake before she slips off onto the floor entirely.

It’s a strange and restless summer, uprooted from everything you knew, and with no friends or familiar places to go you spend the bulk of it at Mutiny. Lev shows you how to play Adventure, Yo-Yo gives you piggyback rides, and Haley draws portraits of all the coders, of Mom and Dad and Cameron. It’s funny, you think, how your family split itself apart and came back twenty times larger.

And when school starts you’re doubly glad to have Cameron; you can’t talk to your parents like you can to her, and they don’t listen anyway. Cam doesn’t shush you when you call the girls in your class bitches, doesn’t give you that Look when you tell her you failed a test. She just listens, and understands, and you feel better.

 

You’re ten when Cameron disappears; or at least, that’s what it feels like. She’s just gone one day, all her things swept up and her sheets folded at the foot of the bed. You’re sad, shocked, even, but it doesn’t really start to feel like a betrayal until your father tells you she got married. You’d have expected- something. For her to tell you about this guy you’ve never heard of, to show you the ring, to tell you she was leaving. Anything. She was your best friend.

Months later you see her, standing in the cookie aisle, and when you see her face everything you’ve been wanting to say stops up in your throat and you just throw yourself into her arms as she bends down to meet you. She clutches you and Haley to her chest, almost too tight, and when you look up, she’s staring over your shoulder at your mother, with that wide-eyed look she has, and there’s a regret there you don’t understand. “I’m going to Japan,” she says. It’s barely a whisper. She was your best friend, and now she’s gone.


	2. Chapter 2

For your eleventh birthday you get a package postmarked from Tokyo. It’s Space Bike; you’ve heard about it, but you had no idea it was Cameron’s project. In her letter she tells you it won’t be out until fall in the states, but she wanted you to try it now. Everything’s different in Japan, she says. Tom is so busy with work, she often wanders around downtown Tokyo, discovering new and strange foods and music and gadgets; it’s fun, she says, but it’s lonely, strangely, even with so many millions of people all around. She tells you to say hi to your sister. She doesn’t mention your mother.

You’ve seen Mom sitting in her office, hand hovering over the phone; you don’t think she ever did end up calling. Still, the number is there, on a note next to the computer, collecting dust.

Space Bike is a funny game, not like Mario or anything else you’ve played. It’s about growth and exploration, continuous and without end, and it’s not hard to see the inspiration for the intrepid little blonde biker on your screen. You love it and so does Haley; she’s had an obsession with space ever since your dad took you two to the outskirts of town to see Halley’s comet last year. The dreaminess is what gets you; the endless adventure, not about killing monsters or bandits but discovering yourself. It’s Cameron’s game, and in many ways it’s a game about Cameron. When you play, your mother looks over your shoulder, sometimes, and from the save slots you can tell that when you’re not home she’s tried it for herself.

“Mom misses you,” you write back. It’s true, even if she won’t say it.

 

You’re twelve when Fred from math class tries to kiss you behind the school gym, and you punch him in the face. He yells at you while you stomp away, calls you a bitch. You don't care; he’ll show up to school with a black eye tomorrow and come up with a tough sounding excuse, but you’ll know.

When you tell her, Jennifer looks at you like you’re crazy; Fred’s the best looking guy in your grade, even you know that. She’s your friend now, a far cry from two years ago, but still sometimes you feel like the two of you are worlds apart. She’s always been better at the popularity stuff, liking the right things, talking to the right people, handling the looming specter of puberty. You do alright. Your tastes are on the eclectic side but normal enough to pass, usually, but you do have a quick temper, a bitchy attitude, as Jennifer puts it, that often makes her stare at you like she regrets keeping you around.

So when she gawks at you, sneers, “You’re gonna have to grow up sometime, Joanie,” it’s nothing new but it stings all the same.

Tearfully, that evening, you tell your mother you hate boys; she just laughs, not unkindly. “I was the same at your age,” she says. “When you’re older, you’ll meet a nice guy, and you’ll change your mind.” Somehow, you know you won’t.

 

You’re thirteen when your parents get divorced, and thank God. It’s been a long time coming. It’s also the year Dad tells you about his condition, and that’s no surprise either; it’s been obvious for a while now that something was wrong. Still, it’s harder than you expected, seeing your mother move out and your father struggle with a single flight of stairs. Even the things you see coming can knock you off your feet.

Your free time is mostly spent on the phone with Cameron; it's a rough time, puberty, and somehow Mom’s too close and too distant all at once to really talk to. You shoot up like a stalk, sprout curves, and have to buy an entire new wardrobe. Cam ships you some stuff from Japan, shoes, tops, her Shonen Knife shirt which apparently Tom finds tasteless (shonen knife means dick). She sends you her games and favorite music, manga, everything, and you send things back, tell her about home and all the stuff she’s missing. One day your dad gets the phone bill and for a second you think he’s gonna collapse and break some furniture again; from then on you have to pay your long distance bills with your own allowance.

From the sound of it Cam seems like she appreciates the calls as well; Tokyo’s grown on her but she and Tom get more distant every day, each busy with work of course but it’s something else, too. It's like Tom expects her to just settle down and raise a few kids, Cameron says, and she's just joking but she sounds restless, unhappy. You don't want to pry, but sometimes you're not sure why she married him in the first place.

 

You're fourteen when it finally clicks into place and you just realize, like it’s been staring you in the face this entire time. Christ. You’re gay. It puts everything into a new perspective, the way you look at your friends sometimes, your complete lack of interest for guys, how much you admired _Cameron, fuck_ , and you kind of have to sit down and have a minor crisis or two.

You tell Mom first; you know she’ll understand, and she does. You stumble through your explanation, staring down at your fidgeting hands, and when you’re done she just folds you up into a hug. “Oh, sweetheart,” she says, muffled into your hair, “It’s okay. It’s okay, I’ll always love you, no matter what.” You let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding.

When you tell Dad a few weeks later, it’s different. Not that he’s a bigot, or anything; he’s just never really _got_ you, not really, even when he started staying home, trying to make up for the lost time from your childhood. So you just blurt it out over the kitchen counter, one day, when he makes so stupid dad joke about boyfriends. Sure enough you get about a minute of silence before he speaks. “You- you like girls?”

You wince. You nod.

“I… alright.” He takes a breath, like he’s steeling himself, and looks at you. “Joanie? I love you, and- and all I want is for you to be happy. And if a girl makes you happy, then... I mean, just promise you’ll bring her here and introduce us, okay?” This time, you’re the one who hugs him.

For some reason you leave Cam for last. She’d never hate you for it, you know that, but still somehow you’re nervous. You hesitate and agonize over it until finally you just punch in the numbers and say “I have to tell you something,”, all in a rush, as soon as she picks up the phone.

“Joanie?” She sounds bleary and half-awake. “It’s like, six A.M.”

“Oh shit, sorry I’ll call back later-”

“No, hey,” she shushes, “I’m awake now. What is it? Must be a pretty big deal for you to forget about time zones.”

“I- um, I like women.” For a moment, there’s silence. “Cam?”

“No, yeah, just- me too.” Her voice is soft.

“You never said-”

She laughs a little. “Never came up.” Before you can say anything, there’s a shuffle on the other end of the line. “Damn it, I think I just woke up Tom. I gotta go.”

“Oh,” you hesitate, “okay. Bye.”

“And hey, Joanie?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t worry about it. You? You’ll be just fine.”

**Author's Note:**

> Send me prompts or suggestions at honestfutures.tumblr.com!
> 
> Fun fact: Joanie's date of birth actually isn't consistent; in season 1 Gordon buys a Cabbage Patch doll for her birthday around when Hurricane Alicia hits, in August 83, and in season 3 her party happens well before Cameron goes to Texas with Boz for the weekend of July 4th. Whatever, I'm rounding out to June. Let me know if any other dates don't add up!


End file.
